Enigma
by Jinxgirl
Summary: When Tegan becomes determined to find out just what truly did happen to Heather Donahue after the movie's opening release, she discovers more than she anticipated.


I never would have known, if it wasn't for the media. They always have to get involved in everything, pushing in to invade people's privacy for the cash, whoring out other people instead of themselves. I'd noticed it before, with celebrities and criminals, but my family was ordinary, even boring. How could I have ever thought it would have anything to do with me?

The movie came out when I was eighteen, dragging my feet about making definite plans about college and careers, the end of my childhood and the beginning of my future life as an official adult, or at least that weird limbo stage in between when you're not yet 21. I've never been a huge fan of horror movies, but because of the media, and the crazy amount of hype they were putting out about it, none of my friends could stop talking about it. Even before it was out in the theaters, they had all seen ads on TV, had watched the trailers online and looked it up on the official website. None of us had ever heard anything about the Blair Witch before, but by the time the movie was out in the theaters, it seemed to me that it was all anyone could talk about. But it wasn't really the movie that had everyone so jazzed up, because after all, none of us had even seen it yet, at that point. It was the fact that supposedly, it wasn't just a movie at all. It was all true, and everything that happened in it was true too. Not just a reenactment, not actors pretending to be the real people- but the real people, really filmed in real life time.

That was pretty interesting even to me, but not enough to make me want to see it, not then. If some kids really did disappear in the woods, and that video was of them getting killed, I thought it was kind of sick and disgusting that someone was making big bucks off releasing it. I rolled my eyes when everyone else made plans to go see it or played the trailers around me, and I didn't think much more about it.

Yet.

But then I caught my mother, standing like she was frozen in front of the TV when I came home one afternoon, staring at the Blair Witch trailer playing across the screen with her mouth open and tears streaming down her cheeks. She wouldn't answer me when I asked her what was the matter. In fact, she practically ran out of the room and ignored me completely when I tried to bring it up again later that day. That night, when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I saw that the kitchen light was on and went to go see if someone was up. Mom was sitting there, hunched over the laptop she had bought me for Christmas last year, looking at something on the screen so intently that when I called out to her, she jumped and seemed to be choking back a scream.

"Mom, what are you doing up this late?" I had asked her, more concerned than anything. "And what are you doing on my laptop?"

"Nothing, Tegan, I just couldn't sleep," she told me, but she was shutting the computer as she spoke without even bothering to lock it first. "I'm going to sleep too now."

When she had headed down the hallway and was out of my sight, I opened the laptop again and checked her search history, wanting to see what it was she had been doing. The last several sites she had been on were about the Blair Witch legend, the Blair Witch movie, and a lot of searches and websites that had to do with the disappearance of some girl named Heather Donahue.

It didn't make any sense to me. My mom was worse about horror movies than I was. Even The Nightmare Before Christmas had creeped her out, and it was a Disney movie. Why would she be looking up all this stuff about that stupid movie when she wasn't going to watch it anyway?

I decided to test her out. My mom and I sort of had a weird relationship in some ways, more like sisters than mother and daughter. She was pretty young when she had me, and my father had died when I was only eight years old, in some sort of accident that was mysterious in its details to me even ten years later. For almost as long as I could remember it had just been my mom and me, and to think that she might be keeping something from me, even something as silly as an interest in a horror movie, was sort of uncomfortable for me.

"I'm going to go see that new Blair Witch movie everyone's been talking about when it comes out next week," I told her the next morning as I got milk out of the refrigerator, careful not to look at her too obviously as I walked to the kitchen table to sit with her. "It looks pretty cool."

I don't know what I expected her to do or say, exactly. Remind me that I hated horror movies, maybe, or tell me that it looked like it would be terrible, or exploitative or something. But my mother didn't say any of that. I watched instead as her fingers whitened around her coffee cup, her whole face seemed to lose its color as her skin stretched over her cheekbones with sudden strain, and her voice when she answered me was sharper than I could remember her ever talking to me before.

"You will not go see that movie, Tegan. I forbid it."

Don't get me wrong, my mother had never been the kind of parent that let me do whatever I wanted and didn't have any rules or expectations. I always had to do my chores and homework, get decent grades, and let her know when I'd be home if I was going out and where I was going. But she had never been strict with me as long as I was doing more or less what I was supposed to be doing, and she had never been overly concerned with the books I read, the music I listened to, or the movies I watched. So here sitting there and telling me she forbid me to watch something, especially when she herself had been watching the trailers and reading everything she could find about it online, kind of floored me. What the hell was she playing at?

"Mom, you can't forbid me to watch it if I want to watch it," I pointed out to her. "In case you forgot, I'm old enough to watch a rated R movie on my own. Actually, I'm pretty much old enough to do whatever I want to do. Eighteen, remember?"

"You are not watching that movie, Tegan Atwood," she almost spat, sitting up so straight in her chair it looked like someone had forced a ruler up her spine. "Don't you dare. If you actually go to see that- if you pay MONEY to go see that…that…"

"That what, Mom?" I asked when she cut herself off, just shaking her head tightly. "Why are you freaking out so much about this movie? I mean, I get that it supposedly is real or whatever, and that's kind of gross, but it's not like it's anyone we know. It's like watching a documentary of a war or something, only with far fewer deaths and tortures."

"Don't do it, Tegan," was all she would tell me, her voice dropping into a tone so weak and shaky then that it scared me more than when she had yelled. "Please, just please don't watch it, please don't go see that dreadful thing. Please."

And I didn't know what to say after that. My mother was not the sort of woman who was easily overexcited by things. For the first time that I could remember, I was starting to understand that there was more to my mother than what she let me know or see, and I didn't like that realization at all.

I think it was that as much as anything that made me start to snoop around. I don't know what I thought I might find, exactly. It's not like I expected to find a diary or anything, or like I would even be sure if I wanted to read it if I did. I waited until I was home after school one had and had been reminded of it by another trailer ad on TV, and when the instinct came to me, I went with it.

I started with her bedroom, because obviously that's where most people would choose to hide something they didn't want anyone else to see. I felt pretty stupid about it, digging around under her mattress and bed like she was the teenaged kid and I was the parent suspecting her of keeping drugs or dirty magazines or something. I was praying like crazy the whole time that if I did come across something, it wasn't going to be something totally disgusting like a vibrator or porn movies or something. Not that I would understand what that has to do with her being weird lately, anyway.

I found it in a box in the back of her closet. It was a shoebox, actually, and I almost didn't even bother to open it, because usually in shoeboxes, you're going to find shoes. But my mom has a shoe rack for her shoes that every other pair of shoes she owns are neatly arranged on, and she's always after me to use the shoe rack in my room too instead of letting shoes drop to my bedroom floor. So I opened it up, and there weren't shoes in there at all. Instead, it was a stack of papers, what looked like letters and pictures.

Wondering if it was something like love letters from my dad, from when they were younger, I shuffled through them, interested. But all the pictures were of what looked like the same dark haired, round-faced little girl, from the time she was a very small baby up until she was maybe in her mid teens. There was something strangely familiar about the girl's smile, the shape of her eyes, but I didn't put together why that might be, until I started reading the first letter.

The first couple of letters were just confusing. I didn't recognize the woman's signature at the bottom, and they were all about what seemed like the little girl, about how she was learning to walk and talk and how she liked certain stuffed animals and being in the water and everything else about a baby and toddler's pretty typical existence. Who was this woman writing to my mother anyway- a friend, a distant cousin? I thought it was weird that she only talked about the little girl and not about herself or her own life. Why would my mom keep letters like that, hidden away like that?

It wasn't until the fourth letter that things started to add up slowly. The woman writing was telling my mother that the little girl, Heather, had been told for the first time that she was adopted and her reaction to it. The child had written her name and drawn a picture for Mom at the bottom of the letter in addition to the woman's signature, and as I flipped through the other letters quickly, still not quite believing the understanding beginning to dawn on me, I saw that as the letters progressed, the woman had stopped writing them, and Heather herself had taken over in sending letters and pictures. And although Heather always addressed my mother by her first name, by the third letter, she was signing her own name prefaced by two words my brain could not quite comprehend.

"Your daughter." This girl Heather, the girl whose mother had been writing to my mother ever since her infancy, had referred to herself as my mother's daughter.

I read the words over and over again, as though eventually they would spell out something else, or develop new meaning to me. But there they were, plain as day. Your daughter. If this girl could be believed, and I had no reason I could conjure up of why she might lie, then she was somehow my mother's child. And that made her…well, that made her my sister.

That was more than enough of a shock to me; I think it was too much then, to really get the full impact of what I had learned, the bigger truth behind it all. It was enough to know that I had a sister, somewhere, that I was not the only child that I had always been lead to believe that I was. My mother had had another daughter, had obviously given her up for adoption without ever saying a word to me about it, and all these years, she had kept up with this girl without even giving me the option of having her a part of my own life too. From what I could tell from the letter's dates, the girl was a good bit older than me, probably around 25 now. Did she even know that I existed too, or did she too think that she was my mother's only child? Why would my mother keep us apart from each other? Even if she didn't want to know this Heather any more than through letters and pictures, what gave her the right to not give me the option for myself?

Or was that what this Heather wanted, to have nothing to do with me? Was it possible that she did know about me, and she only cared about talking with my mother?

I was too angry thinking through it all that I didn't even bother to read through the rest of the letters or look at the pictures. I wasn't sure that I wanted to know what any of it said. I spent most of the time that I was waiting for my mother to return home just pacing the house, one of the more recent pictures of the girl who was my sister clinched in my fist, and almost as soon as my mother was through the front door, I thrust it out at her, not even bothering to say hello.

"Who is this?" I spat out at her, even though I had pretty much figured this out for myself, minus one or two of the most important details. "Who is this, and why the hell do I not already know for myself?"

My mother sagged. There could be no other way to describe how she backed up against the wall, her entire body seeming to go limp as she pressed one hand against her chest, the other reaching out almost blindly to grasp the door frame to support herself. With tears quickly coming to stand in her eyes, she made no effort to take the picture from me or even to push it away, but she didn't turn her head either. She just stared at Heather's picture, as pale and shaken as if I had shown her the girl's dead body instead of a smiling snapshot of her face.

It took her almost fifteen minutes to go through with the story, most of it which I'd already pieced together myself. Heather was my sister, seven years older than me, born when my parents were unmarried and still in high school. My mother had not been ready to raise a child and had been strongly encouraged by her parents to stay in school and get her diploma, something that would have been much tougher, had she kept and raised the baby herself. She had chosen an infertile couple who agreed to a semi open adoption, with contact limited to sending pictures and letters on an annual basis to update her and my father on the child's development. Although my mother knew the address and names of the couple who had adopted the baby, as well as the name they had chosen for her, Heather Ann, she didn't have the rights to visit her, and she had never spoken to her on the phone.

I heard her tell me all of this, in a weak, trembling voice I was not used to hearing from my mother's mouth, and yet still I could not understand. Why would she not tell me this? What would make her lie to me, for all of my life?

"I thought that there would be other children, in time," was all she could come up with, her lips pressing together tightly. "I thought that you would have other brothers and sisters, Tegan, that you were only the first of many more. It didn't seem right to confuse you, or Heather either, by telling you about each other. You were only children, you would both have so many questions about why Heather was living with other people, why you couldn't see each other or talk to each other, why I kept you and not Heather. I thought that there would be brothers and sisters for you, some day, and it wouldn't matter if you and Heather knew each other or not. And your father and I, we tried…"

Here her lips pressed together even more tightly, and although she closed her eyes, two tears slipped out before she opened them again. "We tried, Tegan, but it never happened, and then he…you know what happened, with your father. And by then it just seemed…it felt like it was too late. You were eight, and Heather was fifteen…how do you explain to girls that age, that they are sisters?"

I didn't know what to say. I just sat there, staring at her, trying to take it all in, as she spoke again, still shaking her head.

"But I should have. I know that now, I should have, and it's just one of my regrets, so damn many regrets with my children. You could have been sisters…you should have been sisters, and now…"

"Now what?" I interrupted, frowning at her. "Now we still can, can't we? I know about her now, and she's older than I am, she'll understand it now too. Why can't I write her now and introduce myself? It's not like you can stop me."

My mother shook her head tightly, barely seeming able to force out her reply to me.

"No, you can't, Tegan. She's dead," she forced out, still shaking her head. "Don't you get what I'm telling you? Your sister is Heather, Tegan- Heather Donahue. Your sister is dead."

The name rang a bell dimly, but even then, it didn't come to me. I thought the name was familiar from the letters, though it seemed to me that paired together like that, I'd heard it somewhere else, somewhere that I hadn't paid much attention. I guess it showed on my expression that I still wasn't cluing in, because my mother raised her voice, seeming agitated that she had to spell this out to me so plainly, that I would force her to say it aloud.

"That damn movie, Tegan, that terrible thing that they're blasting all over the news and playing on hundred foot screens for everyone to see, that horrific thing that someone is making MONEY off of, at dead people's expense! Don't you understand, that's your SISTER on that thing! Heather Donahue is my child, your sister! Someone out there is making a profit off of her death, and all these people are watching it to be entertained, like it's nothing, like whatever happened to her out there is just like any other movie!"

All the pieces of the puzzle of the past several days clicked into place then, showing me a picture that was terrible in its brutal reality. My mother's secretiveness and anguish over the movie, her online searches, the pictures stashed away, where I would not see…and the strange familiar look of the girl's eyes and smile, not just in the pictures my mother had hidden, but in the flashes of her face I had seen on the trailers, on the missing posters online.

The movie that everyone had been talking about, that everyone I knew was planning to see, was a documentation of my own sister's death.

88

I'm not sure what I told my mother after that to get her to calm down again; I know that whatever it was, it was definitely a lie. I had no intention whatsoever, after all these revelations, to simply go about my life like I knew nothing, or even to mourn for Heather, as my mother seemed to be doing. How could I mourn someone that I had never known? How could I even know what I had lost, if I had never known that she was there to lose?

Instead, it became my resolution to know more, to learn everything there was to know about who my sister had been, and what had happened to make it impossible to ever know her from anything other than the facts and memories she had left behind. My mother's strong feelings towards the movie, and all my assurances to her that I would never see it, out of respect for her and for my dead sister, meant nothing to me, stacked up against my need to know and understand. And somehow, even before I knew the first thing about Heather and the sort of girl she had been, I had a feeling that she would understand and approve of this drive of mine. After all, we shared the same DNA; we must have shared some of the same traits, the same personality quirks, just like we shared the same eye color and smile. What else could have driven her into dangerous and poorly charted woods, after some legend, other than a desire, like mine, to know more?

It took a lot of restraint on my part to keep from calling up her parents, once I found out their names and numbers, to ask them everything that they could tell me about her. But I resisted. If Heather had not known about me, they may very well not know of me either, and it wasn't likely that they would be open to their daughter's hidden sister pounding them with questions on a girl they were still mourning. It took further restraint not to contact the parents of the boys she had disappeared with, Josh and Michael, or at least one of their friends. But if I was going to know Heather, I figured, I was going to have to know her from what I could discover of her on my own, instead of from what other people's impressions of her were. I would know her from reading her own words, looking at her pictures and her films, piecing together the actions she had taken in her life, and draw my own conclusions. It was better to know her from my experience of her, instead of depending on someone else's.

So that's what I did. I looked up everything I could find on her, starting with reading everything I could online about her case. From what I could determine, Heather had gone missing five years ago, and the video of her and the two boys had only been found last year. She had been twenty years old when she went missing, and up until that point, she seemed to have lived a totally normal life. I looked through pictures of her as a little girl, enrolled in dance and T-ball, dressed up for Christmas and Easter, getting awards in school and dressed up for the prom. She had gotten good grades, almost straight A's, and she had been enrolled in a well respected college, majoring in communications. She had planned to be a director for films; that had been what drove her into the woods in Burkettsville, Maryland, in the first place.

I read over the interviews of her friends, looked at the newspaper clippings from when she was in school about her honor rolls and her community service acts, and slowly a sense of the girl who had been my sister came into my mind. Heather had been driven, this was obvious, focused and goal oriented, the sort of person who never settled for anything short of achieving what she wanted to. She would have had high expectations for herself and for others, to the point of sometimes rubbing them the wrong way and offending them with her tendency to cut to the point, no tact needed. She was intelligent, but arrogant about it, so certain of her own smarts that she would have thought herself able to handle any situation she found herself in. She had not seemed to date often or to have close friends, maybe because her goals and her ways of doing things would have come first over other people and putting time into something she might have thought less important than getting things done.

Heather would not have been an easy person to know, nor the nicest. More than likely, we would have butted heads constantly, if we had known each other, and she might not have been the sort of person you would want to spend time with if you just wanted to relax and have fun. But I could see in my assessment of her pieces of myself, of my mother, and it was enough for me to regret that I would never have the chance to fight with her and resent her and roll my eyes at her myself. The more I learned of her, the more real it became to me that she had in fact carried my blood, and the more I felt the need to know why it was that I would never truly know her at all.

It was shocking to me, just how much there was about her on the internet, how for years now I had been completely clueless that people all around the world were debating over what had happened to her, someone I hadn't even known had anything to do with me at all. My sister was more famous in her death than I would ever be in my life, and no one could even agree on what exactly had happened to her.

The more I read about the theories of Heather's disappearance, then death, and of all the other strange things that had supposedly taken place in the same woods, the more I found myself rolling my eyes. Just because Heather had been researching some legend of a Blair Witch and happened to die in the course of her research didn't mean that all the crazy things I was reading online were true. Murdered witches setting curses, hairy monster people, serial killers possessing and murdering children, haunted creeks and occult sacrifices all were just a little bit beyond the scope of reality to me, and had nothing to do with my sister at all. I doubted Heather had really believed any of it either. But the more I read, the more I knew that I absolutely had to see that movie. There was no other way to know for sure what might have happened to her.

I hadn't told anyone I knew about the connection Heather had to me, the new importance the movie and the mysteries around it had in my life. It seemed too surreal for them to believe, and it was too personal for me to be able to keep from being offended if they laughed or shrugged it off. I didn't go to the movies in the groups that my friends went in. I went in alone, sitting to the side in the very front row, and I watched all 90 minutes of it that first time almost breathlessly, taking in every single detail I could soak up into my memory. And that first time, I was hooked, from the moment my sister's voice could be heard until the last few moments of her terrified screams. It hadn't answered any of my questions about what had happened. If anything, it had only given me more questions to want an answer to. What had really been happening in those woods? What had happened, the moment the camera fell? Why had they found the camera tape, but not Heather's or Josh's or Michael's bodies?

I wrote down as many of the questions as I came up with, and for the next week, I spent every night rewatching the movie in the theater, jotting down notes of the details that struck me each night. Watching my sister and what may have been the record of her last moments, I began to feel as though I knew her well, as though she was finally a living, being breathing that I knew not just from letters or pictures or images on a screen, but in real life, as though we had had a relationship as sisters all along. I could see myself in some of her mannerisms, from the way she rubbed her hands to the shrillness of her voice when she was upset. I watched her shift from a cheerful, driven person who was confident to the point of being obnoxious to an exhausted, emotional mess, half hysterical with fear, and I squirmed with anxiety, wanting to reach out and do something, anything to help and comfort her. I wanted to be there with her, and I hated that I hadn't been, that no one had been.

And with each new viewing, more than ever I wanted to know. What had happened to my sister? Was she still out there, still in need of my help?

It seemed to be the general assumption, from everyone that I talked to, that Heather had died. Most people, either on the forums online or that I talked to at school, seemed to think that once the camera cut off, Heather had been killed. They pointed out Josh's teeth and blood wrapped up in his clothes, the way that he had been screaming, and how Michael had been facing the corner when Heather followed him into Rustin Parr's old house, just like in the legend they had been told about. Most people seemed to think that my sister and the others had been murdered by the Blair Witch, whoever or whatever it was. Some of them went into graphic detail in their theories on just how she had been killed, bad enough that I lay awake on more than one night, unable to get the images of my sister, tormented, dying, or dead, flickering through my thoughts.

Not even one person that I spoke to seemed to think that Heather might still be alive. It had been five years, they pointed out. Even if the Blair Witch didn't get her, exposure, starvation, and thirst would have. She could have been attacked by an animal, could have tripped and hurt her ankle and been unable to walk, without anyone there to get her help. No one seemed to think that it was possible that after five years, Heather could still be out there. No one thought it at all possible that my sister could still be alive.

But I did. No matter how crazy it sounded to anyone else, no matter how little proof I could come up with, the more I researched my sister's disappearance and the more I watched her on her own film, the more I began to feel that maybe, just maybe, they were all wrong. Maybe there was a chance, however small, that my sister was still alive. That if everyone else gave up on her, if no one else gave her a chance, that maybe I could be the one to bring her home at last.

It's true that it had been a long time. It's true that Heather had been showing obvious distress on film, and that she had been cold and hungry and disoriented. But what if the reason she had dropped the camera wasn't because she had been killed, but because someone, whoever it was that had made her scream, that knocked it out of her hands and kept it from her? What if the so-called Blair Witch was nothing more than a human man or woman who was living in that old house, a person who had not killed my sister, but was keeping her captive? He could have been bringing her food and water. He could have had her chained up for the past five years, for all I knew. Michael and Joshua too. Or he could have killed them and kept Heather for himself. I had heard horrible stories before about those kind of things, women being kept as sex slaves or something like that. What if that was what had happened to Heather, and no one would ever help her because they believed in some stupid witch?

Her body had never been found, and neither had the house that she had been filming. That meant that someone had to have moved the camera and film out of the house that she had dropped it in. That person could have been her kidnapper, because why else would they bother to move it, unless they didn't want their actions to be found out- and Heather to be found?

Even if she was dead- and I hated to even think of that possibility- there could have been so many things that could account for how, anything other than everyone's stupid idea of the Blair Witch. She could have had a stalker, following her through the woods and putting out those stick figures and stones, making those creepy noises they heard at night. Or what if it was Josh and Mike all along? They had yelled at her, had even seemed to hate her sometimes, on film. Josh had been the first to disappear, and wasn't that suspicious? What if he and Mike had had a plan all along to do something to Heather? They could have gotten lost on purpose, or maybe they knew exactly where they were all along. That could have been why they kicked the map into the creek, since that part had never made sense to me. They could have planned to scare Heather the whole time, make her weak and freaking out so when they finally did to her whatever they planned to, she wouldn't suspect it or fight back. Maybe they had even been the ones delivering her into the hands of whoever kidnapped her.

Or maybe not. Maybe they really had just gotten lost, and everything I saw in the movie was totally true. If they were scared and hungry and upset, what if one of them killed Heather in that house, either by accident or because they were crazy at that point? What if they had buried her out there, somewhere in the woods, and then died out there themselves or ran away?

I couldn't believe that no one else was asking these questions, considering these possibilities. It seemed to me that none of them were having any faith in Heather, or what was realistic, when they blamed it all on some stupid witch. I didn't know what happened, but I was sure of two things. It wasn't a witch that had made my sister disappear. And I would only be able to understand what really did happen if I went out there, where she had gone, for myself.

88

I didn't tell my mother what I was doing, once I had set the plan up in my head, or even when I had all the details mapped out. She had been upset enough at the thought of me even watching the movie. To know that I planned to go out into the same woods that Heather had gone, without even taking someone else with me like she had, would have made her lock me into my room and throw away the key, without caring that I was eighteen years old and that wasn't technically legal. I could understand why she would be upset. After all, she had lost one daughter, and she obviously wouldn't want her only daughter left, the one she actually lived with, to go lose herself in the same way.

But my mother hadn't watched Heather the way that I had. And no matter what she might have read online, or even if she had talked to Heather's adoptive parents at some point over the years, she couldn't understand why I needed to know, not without watching what Heather had gone through for herself. She couldn't understand without seeing the terror in Heather's eyes just how completely necessary it was for me to find her, to help her, if there was even the smallest chance that she was out there needing my help. And if she wasn't, and all that I could do was find her body, or figure out what had killed her…well, then Heather deserved that too. Her story was out there for the world to know, without an ending attached to it, without the person who might have done this to her getting what they deserved. How could I just continue on with my life, knowing that?

I couldn't. I was sure of that. So the first long weekend that came up, a teacher work day that meant I was not required to go to school that Monday, I told my mother that I was going on a beach weekend with one of my close friends. My friend didn't ask many questions when I asked her to back me up, even talking to my mom on the phone herself and having her older sister pose as her mother to answer the questions Mom had. And she had plenty; with the movie just having come out, she was feeling pretty overprotective. Once she had reluctantly agreed and told me a hundred times to be careful and keep in touch with her- something I was pretty sure wouldn't be possible in the woods- I was free to research hiking, buy everything that I read could be useful in the woods overnight, and load up my car's trunk with the essentials. And then all that was left to do is wait until the day of my plan to head off to the Maryland woods.

I strongly considered inviting someone else to go with me. After all, Heather hadn't gone alone, and maybe having other people would help me be able to find all the locations I wanted to get to faster. Maybe it would help me have a better understanding of how Heather had been thinking and feeling, to spend several days in difficult conditions with people I didn't know very well and who might be getting on my nerves. But in the end all the people I considered asking all seemed wrong for it, and it seemed too personal, somehow, to share my experience with anyone else, except maybe the siblings of Josh and Mike, if they had any. I didn't know how to locate them, though, or exactly how I'd explain if I did, so I set out on my own, with no one to distract me from my mission.

I had spent some time in the days before practicing reading maps, so getting to the woods themselves wasn't that difficult. I made sure that I rested well before hand, knowing that more likely than not, rest wouldn't come easy for me in the woods, like it hadn't for my sister. I had also mapped out the weather ahead of time and made certain that the temperature was never below freezing on any of the nights I planned to be out there. I had brought as much food and chemicals for cleansing water that I could carry in my backpack, first aid kit, flashlights, batteries, and as little clothing as I could manage and still be comfortable along with extra shoes and the tent. It was heavy, all together, but that was okay. It made me understand how Heather must have felt, carrying so much with so little energy.

I knew that I would have to pace myself, so I took my time, resting for at least ten minutes every couple of hours. I ate only a little, only when I was hungry, making sure that my supplies would last me, and I made sure to drink water much more. And for the first night out there, everything was well. I made good time towards the first stop, Coffin Rock, frequently checking the maps and printed out drawings of the sites where Rustin Parr's house was thought to be, and where Heather's equipment was found. None of them had been difficult to come across online, and I was sure that once I found Coffin Rock, if I just kept following along the map, I would come across them without too much trouble. I had a compass too, and it would keep me from wandering off too far in the wrong direction.

It wasn't going to be like it had been for my sister. There was no one with me to lose or destroy my belongings, no one that would distract me with arguing until I walked in circles, back to where I had come from. It was only me, and I was focused. I was ready.

It was difficult for me to sleep, that first night, but not for the reasons that Heather hadn't. She had heard noises, had awakened in the night to unidentified cries and shrieks, but for me, it was the strange stillness that kept me restless. You would think that in the woods, you would hear noises of the forest awakening just as you settle down to sleep, everything from cracking twigs to rustling leaves and calling birds. But I heard nothing. Even as I lay still, listening, waiting to hear the blowing wind or an animal's cry, the silence around me was so total it almost made my ears ring with its force. How could these be the same woods that surged alive in the night for my sister, now seeming to fade into a black void of nothingness for me?

It was the same when I woke up in the morning, much too quiet for me to be able to stand it comfortably. I found myself deliberately making more noise than I had to, just to pack up and get ready to move on, and by the time I was walking I was shuffling my feet deliberately on the forest ground, needing the reassurance of hearing rocks kick beneath me and leaves crunch at my feet. Within the next few hours of following the path I had set out on, I found myself humming to myself, and occasionally even talking to myself out loud. It seemed necessary to me, as though I had to disguise the quiet with my own noise, to prove that I was alive out there, even if nothing else was.

Because that too was something I was starting to notice. I had come across no other hikers during my time in the woods so far, but that, I could shrug off, given their new notoriety, and the fact that I had been walking for a full day. But I had also not seen any birds, any deer or raccoons or foxes, any snakes or squirrels or even insects. How could it be that I had walked for a full day in the forest, and the only living things I had seen were plants and trees?

I tried to shrug it off. Compared to what Heather had experienced, with the strange, threatening noises and the odd creations she had come across, silence seemed like it should be a gift more than trouble. But the silence did bother me all the same. I almost felt as though something or someone were watching me, holding back from revealing themselves until they had a better understanding of who I was and what it was I was doing. I knew that was pretty paranoid, but that was how I felt.

I tried as I walked to stay focused on my steps and the words of the songs I sang to myself. It was too easy to think of the drawings of the Coffin Rock victims, flayed alive and tied together in that strange star shape, or the little girl's hand, reaching out of the creek. But more than anything I thought of the one part that I knew was true, the part in Heather's video of the handprints on the walls of Rustin Parr's old house. There had been so many of them, all over the walls….how had they gotten there? Had he made them press their hands there, like a record of their existence before they died? Had they been trying to feel their way to escape in the darkness, using the walls as a guide? The hands had been too small to be Josh's or Michael's. Was it possible that they weren't blood at all, but just paint? But how would someone have gotten paint all the way out there, and what were they hoping to do by faking bloody handprints?

I hadn't thought about how much time I would have to think in the woods, how spending hours and hours with no one but myself for company would make my mind work overtime, tossing around all the theories I had read and heard as well as those I had tossed around myself. In the end, none of them mattered, really. I didn't care what had happened to the other people in these woods, or why. Really, I didn't even care what had happened to Josh and Michael. But I did care what had happened to Heather, and that was what I thinking of.

And then a new thought occurred to me. What if, in order for me to be able to think like Heather had thought, to follow the course she had taken and to feel the way she had felt, I would have to experience the woods in the same way that she had? What if the fact that I was alone, that I was warm and as comfortable as I could be, with enough food and a map and compass, meant that I would never be able to get insight on her fate, because I had not followed in her experience out here at all? Was it possible that I had to suffer like Heather had in order to know exactly where her suffering had lead her?

The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me, and the more quiet the woods seemed around me. It seemed to me like everything living was holding its breath, impatient for me to get this, just waiting for me to understand and do what I needed to truly understand my sister, to truly step into her skin.

So I did it. I couldn't do anything about coming into the woods alone; it was too late for me to backtrack and ask for two boys I barely knew to come with me. But I left my food in a neat pile beside a large tree, marking it with an X and noting to myself everything around it. Coming back, I would probably need it, but for now, I needed to know what it was to be hungry. I left every article of clothing beyond the bare minimum to cover my skin behind me, as well as my sleeping bag. If I couldn't feel as cold as Heather had, I could at least feel uncomfortable to the weather. The final touch was to leave my map behind. That was hard for me to do, and I debated it for at least fifteen minutes. How could I find where Heather had gone without the help of a map? Yet, what if I needed to feel as lost and disoriented as Heather had, to understand how she had gone the way she had gone?

It was necessary. It was something I had to do. I left it all behind and walked on.

It took me a few minutes to notice that as soon as I did, I could hear the first break of the forest's silence, with the occasional crackle of sticks or rustling of leaves. It was as if it was giving me a personal applause to my decision- or as though for the first time, something or someone was finally near.

88

That night, I shifted on the hard floor of my tent, unable to get comfortable without my sleeping bag to fall into sleep. But it was okay with me; it was preferable, even. This must have been how Heather felt, tossing and turning and shivering awake with cold. Her stomach must have growled and clinched with hunger, like mine was starting to, and she must have closed her eyes tightly even as she strained her ears, listening for any threatening noises around her.

When I listened, I heard nothing but the faint whistle of wind around my tent. It wasn't until I stirred awake from a fitful sleep, sometime after I had first drifted off, that I heard it for the first time.

It sounded like something walking around me, close enough for me to hear the crunching of its footsteps on the forest ground. It sounded too heavy, its steps too close together to be a deer or a squirrel, too light to be a bear or wolf. As I opened my eyes, holding my breath to listen more closely, its movements seemed to stop. I wondered if it could see me, even through the tent's walls, and had to stop myself from sucking in a loud breath.

I had started to think that I had imagined the noise, or maybe I had misjudged their source, when a loud clicking noise began. It sounded like the clucking of a tongue, vibrating with an odd hiss to it, like a snake about to strike. And yet it couldn't be a snake, there was no way that a snake could make noises like footsteps as it moved.

I could feel my heart knocking hard against my chest, my breath catching in my throat even as I struggled to find the words to call out.

"Who is it? Who's there?"

The exact wrong words to say, the wrong thing to do. Everyone who's ever watched a horror movie knows better than that. But it was all I could think of to say, all I could think of to do.

What would Heather have done? Heather would have gone after it, I thought. Heather would have taken her camera and tried to track the source of the footsteps down. But I had no camera, something that I realized with a start was a serious mistake on my part too. How could I understand my sister and her fate, if I could not view the world as she had, through a secondary lens?

The hissing echoed around me, and I drew my knees tight to my chest, tensing myself up in anticipation of an attack. But it never came. There were no further footsteps, and as I lay awake, waiting for morning light to come, my body aching with tension and lack of sleep, it didn't occur to me until I had struggled out of the tent and started to pack up to move forward for the day.

If whatever or whoever it was from the night before had not come closer to me, and I knew this because I had not heard its footsteps, then that didn't mean it had gone. In fact, that gave every indication that if I couldn't hear footsteps, either advancing or retreating, they were still right there near me, close enough to see me, even if I couldn't see them.

88

It was harder, the next day, to press forward. When I woke up my entire body ached, and it was difficult to sit up, to get to my feet, to even put one step in front of the other. My head pounded with every step, my eyes felt hot and gritty, and my body was aching and heavy, the weight of the backpack seeming nothing but a boulder on my shoulders. It was my second day without food, without a map, and I could more than understand Heather's irritability with the others. If I'd had anyone else to snap at, other than myself, I probably would have been taking every opportunity possible to take it out on them. But there was no one but me, me and the woods, and so I trudged forward, trying to focus on the compass and following the faint sound of running water in the distance. I knew that if I followed the stream, it would have to eventually lead me to Coffin Rock. At least, that's what I thought I remembered from the map. My memory didn't seem so great anymore. Even thinking of songs to sing out loud to myself, I would have to stop, losing the lyrics or the tune of the song when I tried.

The problem was that I couldn't find the stream. I walked for what my watch told me was half the day, with only a few short breaks to rest, and there was nothing. It always sounded like the water was just around the bend, just close enough for me to be there in a mile, even in a minute, and yet it never came into my view. It had been hours, and the water that always was right there within my earshot was nowhere to be found.

Finally, panting for breath, my chest tight and aching with frustration, I stopped, my hands hanging loosely by my sides as I closed my eyes, listening as hard as I could. I was down to only a few bottles of water, and I was afraid to drink them, even though my tongue was so dry it was starting to stick to the roof of my mouth. I turned in a slow circle, as the sound of the rushing water grew louder and louder, almost seeming to slam against my ear drums. The more I turned towards where it seemed to be, the more it seemed that it had shifted to the opposite direction. And then it was all around me, loud and close enough that my eyes flew open, convincing myself that a tidal wave was about to sweep over me and carry me away.

But there was nothing. Nothing at all. And as I stood there, trembling, swallowing repeatedly, the noise of the water faded away into total silence, as though it had never been there at all. And then I heard, from somewhere far off and high above me, a noise that could be nothing else but a woman's cackling laughter.

88

Things were not going like they should. I knew that, even when the laughter faded away, and I couldn't entirely draw it back, how it had sounded, in my memory. I was starting to get overly scared and imagine things, or I was so hungry and dehydrated I was beginning to hallucinate. And if it wasn't that, then that meant that someone or something else was out there, following me, watching me, and making these noises somehow. Whichever one of those it was, that meant that I wasn't in the mindset anymore to be able to find out what I had set out to know.

But maybe it was. Maybe I was finally on the right track, even if I no longer had any idea of where I was physically. Because this had surely been how Heather felt, this was the closest yet to what Heather had gone through, and maybe the longer I stuck this out, the closer I would be to finally understanding it all.

But I didn't yet. Even if I knew how Heather felt and what she might have heard or seen that wasn't on the film, I still didn't know how, or why.

I had yet to find Coffin Rock, to see a living creature, let alone a person, and I certainly hadn't come across an Indian graveyard or the Rustin Parr house. I was starting to feel like I never would, that I, like Heather, had no idea anymore what I was doing or where I was going. A few days before, that would have been a good sign to me, because that would mean I was close to how Heather had felt. Now, it only made me tired, tired and anxious.

By the end of the fourth day I was starting not to care anymore if I ever saw them, or figured anything out, even about Heather's fate. I was starting to care only that every part of my body hurt, that I was dirty and exhausted and lonely and scared. All I wanted by then was to give everything up and go home, to let the mysteries of the woods and Blair Witch stay the mysteries they always had been.

But even then I knew that this, too, was what Heather had felt, towards the end. She too had stopped caring about mysteries and knowledge, and had fallen under entirely to fear. And didn't that mean that I, too, was drawing close to knowing? Didn't that mean that the end was coming near?

88

By the end of the fifth day, I had had enough. I had not heard a human voice address me, other than my own, but at night, something or someone kept me lying awake, certain I could hear raspy breathing just outside my reach. I had not seen running water and my own water was gone the day before; even so, I heard the babbling of a river near me each time I swallowed. I stumbled along so heavily I broke leaves and twigs beneath my feet, and yet every step forward that I took seemed to increase the length of the woods still left in front of me.

I knew I could not search one more day; I had lost my strength, my will, my ability to care about my mission or even to hardly remember it. Tonight was it. I would get out of here, or I would stay; the woods would make the judgment for me or against me. Either way, something was going to happen. I could feel it throughout every nerve, and as I sat down on the ground, not bothering to set up a tent for the night, I simply drew in ragged breaths, waiting for night to come.

For what seemed like hours there was nothing but the stillness around me, broken only by the uneven beating of my own heart. When a shrill shriek pierced the air, equal parts fear and fury, I couldn't get to my feet fast enough or with enough coordination to turn towards it, to be able to make out its source. I had only turned my head before an explosion of pain rocked through my skull, and I felt myself fading away, deep inside myself, where there was nothing but dark.

88

I came back into myself all at once, with a sharp awareness that seemed almost supernatural. There was pain, so much pain it seemed to fold around me like a tight blanket, pressing into my skin. It wasn't enough to keep me warm, as my body shook and trembled, jarring sore muscles against a hard ground beneath me. It was some sort of floor, rough and cool, and even before I could open my eyes, I could tell that I was naked against it.

I choked back a cry, wanting to scream out in shock and terror, wanting to kick and fight and push back against what thing had brought this on me, but even thinking about moving seemed to make the pain worse. Instead I strained my eyes, trying to see everything I could in the darkness, to understand what had been done to me, where I had been taken.

It was a basement, I thought. I could see the dark outline of stairs in the distance, and an unfinished wall to my left. There were dark smudges on the walls that I couldn't make out at first, and then they became more clear to me. Handprints. Small, bloody handprints, just like the ones in Heather's video.

I was in the Parr house. Someone, or something, had taken me to the place I had intended all along. But I wasn't excited, or exhilarated, or even relieved to have finally reached my main destination, the last place that we could be sure of that Heather had been. I couldn't think about looking for clues or signs, or even for Heather herself. All could do was lie as motionless as possible with my shaking arms and legs, one question throbbing through my mind like a pulse.

What was going to happen to me now?

I listened hard as my eyes only gradually adjusted to the room's total darkness, every muscle tensed as though to flee. Somewhere nearby I could hear the faint shuffling noises of something moving over the basement floor, and I could see the slight shifting of shadows, the outline of a human form.

There was someone in there with me. Someone turned away from me, not speaking, hunched over in an odd crouch as they focused on the repetitive movements they were making. They were building something. I could make out the figure's bony body, so thin and spindly that it looked more like a skeleton, brought to life, than a living human being, and the only clue to its gender was the long, matted hair in tangles and snarls, falling over its shoulders. I could tell that it was naked, its hunched back rippling with vertebrae so prominent I could count each knob, and there were dark smears on its side. Dirt, maybe…or was it blood?

My breath came in involuntary gasps and spurts as I took in the pile of whitened objects next to the figure, slowly coming to the conclusion that it was a pile of bones. Too long and large to be human, and the skull set on top of them like a macabre crown only made this more certain. On the figure's other side were scraps of mossy, decaying cloths, maybe old clothes of some kind, and as I stared, panic seizing my throat and taking over my vocal cords, I realized that the figure was tearing off strips from the clothes and using them to bind the twigs in her lap, forming an all too familiar shape….the stick figures. In the last corner of the room I saw a pile of stones, neatly piled into small bundles, and drawn in dark, still damp liquid in a circle around my body were strange markings and words I didn't understand.

I heard a faint cry, as weak and terrified as a young child's. I didn't realize until I heard my own voice speaking that it was me who made the sound.

"W-what….what is this? Who are you?"

The figure ignored me, continuing its wrapping of the sticks as though it hadn't heard me speak. Could it hear? Or did it not understand English, or human speech at all?

"Can you hear me?" I raised my voice, trying to make my tone more authoritative, even aggressive, but it was still shaking badly and cracked on the third word. "I asked you what the hell you're doing, why did you do this to me!"

Only when it had completed the stick figure it was working on did the figure acknowledge me. It set its work down, turning towards me very slowly, then began to move towards me in a way that was partly a crawl on all fours. I tried to get to my feet, but fresh pain exploded through my head and legs, and I screamed, falling back on with my head hitting the ground, hard. When I tried again just to move my hand past the writings, I was forced to draw it back when my body writhed in agony. As I looked down at my body, frantic to find the reason for why I hurt so badly, what it was that had been done to me that kept me from being able to move, all I could see were streaks of the same dark liquid, the same strange marks on my stomach and chest and arms.

"No, please," I heard myself cry out, even as the figure crawled closer, its head bent forward to conceal most of its face. "Please, please stop it, please just let me get up. Please!"

It was a woman, I could tell this now, by her naked genitals. There was no other indication of gender, because she was so emaciated that she no longer had breasts or even the slightest curve of flesh on her hips. The dark streaks on her legs and sides continued up her stomach and over her bony arms, and I knew, as much as I wanted to deny it, that the paintings on my body and spattered over hers could be nothing else but blood.

I thought that she would come to me, that she would reach out and touch me, harm me in some way, and I felt another scream rise up in my throat. But instead she continued to crawl past me, in the agile, almost slithering way of an animal more than a human being. I saw her reach out for something large and dark, something my eyes had skipped past due to its blending into the darkness around us. Cradling the object under one arm, she crawled back to me, then sat back on her stringy haunches, lifting the object to her eye .

It was a camera, I saw, long dead, with no glow of a battery to truly record. But what really shook me to my core was that for a brief second or two before the woman had lifted the camera up, her head had been level enough that I could look into her face and see my own hazel eyes staring back at me.

Heather. This was Heather, starved, filthy, and mute before me. Heather, still alive, still making her film. Still seeing the world through the eyes of her lens, even though the lens had broken years before.

I opened my mouth to say my sister's name, to try to explain with words she did not seem to understand anymore, with the language she seemed to have left behind. My sister's name was the last word on my lips when the camera smashed into my skull.

88

August 20, 1999

Reported Missing Person

Tegan Lynn Atwood, age 18, has been reported missing from Greenwood, Virginia. Atwood was last seen leaving her home around 6 pm on Friday evening. Atwood had informed her mother, Sylvia Atwood, that she had plans to stay with a friend, but Atwood's friend revealed to officers that Atwood had no such plans and her true intended plans were unknown. Atwood is considered to be a missing person at this time. Anyone with information as to her whereabouts may contact the Greenwood Police to be of assistance in determining her current location.

End


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